Chapter One
There is one thing I know for sure about the day of the murder: My aunt Hadley wasn’t at Idlewood.
The rest of us were, though—my mother Jane, my brother Reid. My father Mark, too. Even my father’s old friend Paul Burke, up from New York for the long Memorial Day weekend, had paddled to our dock from the next cove. As the sun edged behind the foothills surrounding the lake, the adults toasted the start of summer with gin and tonics. “Where’s the rest of the gang?” Paul asked. “Isaac? How about Andrea?”
My mother glanced at my father, who stared out over the water.
Paul must have sensed the underlying tension between my parents as he polished off his cocktail and swung into the red canoe to leave. “It’s my fault they’re keeping to themselves,” he said. “I bailed Isaac out with the whole restaurant thing, and he’s been avoiding me ever since. I told him that dump was a bad investment. Still is.” He shoved away from the dock and paddled out of the cove.
“The restaurantwasa bad idea,” my father said to my mother. “You should know better than I.”
He transferred the cocktail glasses to a tray and headed toward the house, avoiding stones and exposed tree roots along the path. My mother lingered on the dock, probably grateful for a respite from my father’s brooding silence as she set up the paper lanterns for the festival that started at sunset.
Idlewood was an old family camp on Hero Lake in New Hampshire that my mother had inherited from her father two years earlier. It sat on an island connected to the mainland by a long, narrow footbridge. In those days, we used an outhouse and piped water from the lake. Even now, we cart what we need over in wheelbarrows.
Inside the cabin, my father finished making the Bolognese that had been simmering on the old gas stove all afternoon. Wearing a pink apron that readTwin Delights, he chopped parsley into a fine mince. A copy ofGourmetmagazine lay open in front of him. At the kitchen table, my twelve-year-old brother, Reid, labored over his math homework, mumbling under his breath as he struggled through an algebra proof.
My mother eventually left the dock and came up to the house, where she busied herself by setting the table on the porch for dinner. In the kitchen, she peered out a window, through the trees and across the water toward the parking area on shore, where my father’s yellow Volvo sedan stood out among the birch trees. Late evening sun shone off the water while the first loon of the season cried. Since my parents had only opened the cabin that morning, fishing poles and the winter’s cobwebs spanned the rafters over our heads. On the CD player, Janet Jackson sang.
I lay in a bassinet tucked in the corner of the kitchen, so most of these details come from what I’ve pieced together as I’ve researched the day’s events. Some of them, I’ve filled in with my imagination.
My father blew on a spoonful of Bolognese and carried it to my mother, who still hovered by the kitchen window. “Taste,” he said.
I wonder if he meant the small kindness as a peace offering.
My mother relented. “Delicious.”
“Happy summer,” my father said.
“Let’s hope.”
My father would have been thirty-four then, two years younger than my mother, whom he’d met at a Hero Lake Junior Association dance when they were both teenagers. He was an accountant at my mother’s construction firm and wore glasses and had the slender buildof a cyclist. He hiked and performed with the local summer stock theater, and was busy rehearsing to play the lead inPippin. Unlike my mother, his image at that age is fixed in my mind. I have a photo of him pressed between the pages of a rarely used thesaurus, a photo that ran in the local papers afterward, one that stares back at me with my own blue eyes.
He returned to the stove, while my mother checked the landline for the beep of a voicemail, even though the phone hadn’t rung since we’d opened the cabin. She distracted herself by lifting me from the bassinet, holding me over her head, and calling me “Charlie Bear” until I laughed.
Through the trees came the roar of an engine, followed by the pop of a stone beneath a tire. My mother returned me to the bassinet, then touched the curly blond hair that fell around her shoulders and checked her reflection in a mirror. A moment later, a black pickup truck slid in beside the Volvo. Isaac Haviland got out of the cab and came to the shoreline on the other side of the footbridge.
“I thought you told him to stay away,” my father said.
“Mark, please,” my mother said. “I’ll take care of it.”
My father kept the apron on and the chef’s knife in hand as he went out onto the wraparound porch with my mother trailing behind. Isaac Haviland stood on the opposite shore with his fists on his hips. He was tall and sturdy, with dark hair and a heavy beard. He wore a flannel shirt open to a white T-shirt. He shielded the sun with a hand.
“Jane,” Mr. Haviland called across the water, “talk to me.”
My mother touched my father’s arm, but he shrugged her off, and she watched from the porch as he headed down the path, disappearing into the trees and onto the footbridge. A moment later, he reappeared on the shoreline. The two men were far enough away that my mother couldn’t make out their words, but not so far that their anger didn’t permeate the evening air.
The hinges on the screen door groaned as Reid joined my mother. She ran her fingers through his silky blond hair.
On the shore, my father shoved Mr. Haviland.
“I thought they were friends,” Reid said.
“They are,” my mother said. “But even old friends have rough patches. And I should make sure they don’t make things worse.”
Reid clung to her as though he knew what would happen next. “Stay,” he said.
My mother cupped his cheek in the palm of her hand. “There’s nothing to worry about. I’ll take care of this. You keep an eye on Charlie Bear.”
